FAREWELL KINGDOM

In Farewell Kingdom we see Katsuhiko Maeda's project called World's End Girlfriend at its early stage. World's End Girlfriend is here in a more restrained manner compared to his excellent and more spontaneous "The Lie Lay Land". This album relies a lot in piano melodies so it has romantic feel to it also thanks to the song names as well. It also has its electronica beats and special sound effects like tape manipulation that's very common in World End's Girlfriend sound. One of the things that people will notice is that this album doesn't rely much on guitars, instead it has a decent variety of instrumentations making its sound very well orchestrated, but never overdone. The album has its occasional climaxes and, instead of making a cacophony of instruments, they sound like 65daysofstatic at their loudest passages (although World's End Girlfriend came first than 65daysofstatic) while still maintaining it's fragile symphonic sound in the background. One of the best example of this is in the third song, "Daydream Loveletter". The problem that I have with the album is that the songs sound similar to one another. You also need to have a decent amount of patience as well since most of the time the album is very calm and delicate and climaxes aren't very common on this album, but the ones it has are very well worth it. Plus this album has World's End Girlfriend's most beautiful and melodic song, "You".

If World's End Girlfriend released this album alone it would've gotten a bigger rating, but compared to 2005's "The Lie Lay Land" this album isn't really as wonderful as it once was in 2001. There isn't anything new in this album that can separate it from the whole post-rock bunch so if you're looking for something new or a bit more demanding then go to their 2005 release which I already mentioned too many times in this review.

3.5